“A bad Labour Government will be better than the Tories,” is a sentiment leading to a Government as bad as the Tories
May 27, 2024
by Martin Odoni
I have been pushing back for some years now against the patronising, bullying refrain from the Labour centrists that, “You must vote Labour or otherwise you will let the Tories in!” – a mantra that for some reason did not count in their own minds when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader.
Too many leftists will not push back
I find too many leftists are still allowing themselves to be bullied by this. There is a profound need not to let everything happen on Keir Starmer’s terms, and not just because getting the Tories out of office is not an end in its own right.
Quite simply, Starmer and his arrogant, bludgeoning allies across Labour’s right wing are showing contempt for voter rights by assuming the votes of the left are theirs by default, demanding their uncritical support, rather than appealing for it. The arrangement between voter and candidate is essentially supposed to be an offer of a deal, in a manner of speaking; voters should say, “We will vote for you if you promise us what we want.”
Instead, the summary is being delivered from the highest of hands by the Labour candidates; “Vote for us and we will promise you nothing except that we won’t have the same colour ties as the Tories.”
The more we kowtow, the less we will get
We need on the left to recognise that when we co-operate with this, we are not only allowing ourselves to be bullied, we are actively discouraging Labour from bothering to do anything for us at all.
This is pretty much the Peter Mandelson motto of the last thirty-seven years or so; during Neil Kinnock’s largely calamitous leadership, Mandelson famously said to the right wing of the party, not altogether accurately, that the left has “nowhere else to go.” Therefore, he reasoned, the left vote could be taken for granted and otherwise ignored.
Co-operating with such “Divine right of the leader of the Labour Party” attitudes is not only cowardly and self-abasing, almost acting like the leader of the party is a royal birthright, but it also explains why the Labour Party is currently taking such an uncompromising hard-right position on so many policies. It is because they have the gall to assume we just will vote for them no matter how little they offer us, and so they can focus narrowly on attracting people who normally vote for right wing options.
This is the reason why Labour are not even offering moderate-but-good-sense options that a clear majority of the country – leftists and even many centrists – want to see, such as full re-nationalisation of health care and water. Because they are assuming the people who want such policies will vote Labour come-what-may, while the party is only really interested in seeking the votes of people further right who might be less eager (be it out of economic illiteracy or, likelier if they are richer, they have a vested interest in seeing more privatisation).
Only right wing voters matter
General Elections are now pretty much entirely about courting right wing voters, and they will be the exclusive focus of much of the campaigning in the weeks ahead, to the detriment of all others.
The result is a Labour policy platform so similar to that of the Conservative Party that there is effectively nothing directly for ordinary working class families to get excited about, except the entirely-hypothetical benefits of something nebulously called “economic stability” – which in practice usually means spending cuts and de-stimulation of the economy. There are no policies of any serious value for Britain’s most deprived. Even the gammon-y “flag-shagging” policies are designed to draw support from the poorly-educated right.
But this development, a gradual decline into a heavily right wing Overton Window since the 1980s, is not exclusively the fault of the Labour Right. The left over the last forty years has been too supine, too ready to go along with it.
A harsh truth for all on the left to face
This is not going to be pleasant for some leftists to read, but there is a fact we must face; the real reason why there is so little distinction between the two parties is that too many on the left have lost their will to fight. There are not enough of us prepared to stand up and defy Starmer and his cronies at the top of the Labour Party, nor to treat them as anything other than a King and his Royal Court.
The mistaken belief that Labour is “owed” loyalty but does not owe any in return sounds too much like old style Royalism almost of an English Civil Wars variety. It has led too many on the left, especially those disillusioned by the collapse of Jeremy Corbyn’s project, to go along with the groundless idea that just “getting the Tories out” is enough of a “kindness” by Labour to earn them all our votes.
As a movement, we on the left have to learn to say to the Labour Party, “No, that’s not good enough.” Because what they are offering us for this General Election is patently not good enough, it is just more of the same misery, only from a Government that would be slightly less gleeful about inflicting it. We do have other options, be it the Green Party, the Workers’ Party, the Transform Coalition, or even the network of Left Independents emerging around the country.
We need to reserve the right – and the will to exercise that right – to walk away saying, “We do not owe you our vote, you have to earn it, and this is not enough to earn it. We cannot do business with you this Election, good bye.”
And if they reply, “If you don’t vote for us the Tories will get back in for another five unbearable years,” we must simply respond with, “If that prospect is so unbearable to you, you’d better come up with an improved offer in a hurry then, hadn’t you?”
We keep letting the emotional blackmailers sidestep around the fact that it is in their own interests to offer us a better manifesto. So why do we not use that fact against them?
The Labour right owe us
Heaven knows, after all the filthy, smearing, unprincipled crimes the Labour’s right wing have committed against the left over the last nine years, they owe us a huge amount just in compensation, before we even start talking about how they plan to improve people’s futures. They purged tens of thousands of us for holding democratic socialist ideas, and then let in the likes of racists like Christian Wakeford and Natalie Elphicke, and they do it in the name of democratic socialism? And yet, having told us we were not wanted and racists like them were, they still expect our vote?
Get off your damned knees, people of the left. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the current malaise of the country, for kneeling before mediocre figures of power to begin with. It is precisely that cringing acquiescence towards people who despise us that has helped create this ghastly, inflexible political default of Governments and Opposition parties always being way further to the right than the electorate. That should not even be possible in anything we dare to call a democracy.
We are responsible for allowing it to happen. We just seemed to give up when Kinnock and his Taliban of Labour centrists turned on us in the mid-80s, and we never quite got back on our feet again until Jeremy Corbyn emerged from the back benches.
The only way to escape it is up to ourselves too. We need to start acting like we really are the people in charge, by reminding MPs and political parties that they serve us and not the other way around.
Be firm. Be prepared to say no. Be prepared to say it loudly, and repeatedly. Make them offer you more. Demand it. You have the right to do that, and you have the right to withhold your support from any party that offers you only more Austerity.
A message to the arrogant centrists
As for those patronising centrists asking us what it would take for us to accept that a Starmer Government is better than a Tory Government, I have three points to make in reply.
One, all the evidence suggests there is no real difference. Even over the current horrors in Gaza and Sudan, Starmer has shown himself to be a cruel and unethical machine* who would fit in perfectly on the Conservative backbenches. So maybe the real problem, centrists, is that you are the ones refusing to take facts into consideration?
Two, I already detailed what it would take for Starmer to win our support several years ago, and no progress has been made on any of those points. Indeed, with Jeremy Corbyn’s formal expulsion this week from the corrupt, dictatorial cesspit that Starmer has turned the Labour Party into, positions have only become more entrenched. You would not allow us the option of being in your party, or of having command of your party, even when we were the overwhelming majority within it. But purging us by fair means or foul (almost always foul) was a rejection of our support and co-operation. That includes rejecting our vote, so we will withhold it from you. Do not whine at us, “Oh no no, we still want you to vote for us!” after so many of you were too petulant to support us. You should have thought about that back in 2015 when you started this idiotic and myopic civil war, should you not?
And thirdly, when are you going to accept that it is your responsibility to get your party elected while you are controlling it, and that if you choose to offer us more Toryism, we have every right and reason to say no? It will be your failure, not ours, if we withhold our support and you fail at the ballot boxes. You will have to face the reality that you needed to make us a much better offer.
(I could even raise a fourth point, which is, given Starmer has expressed support for genocide, just what exactly would it take for you to stop supporting the Labour Right?)
There is still time. You can still make a better offer. Go on, have a try. Fail to do so, and if it turns to disaster on polling day, then it will be you centrists who let the Tories back in. Just like you did in 2019 when Labour did make a much better offer and you sabotaged your own party’s entire campaign.
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*The hierarchy of racism in Labour, and indeed in Western societies as a whole, has been established beyond doubt. When there were rumours of beheaded Israeli babies on the 7th October last year, the whole world was screaming its rage, even though it was entirely based on one irresponsible hysteric’s word, and later proved completely groundless, despite President Joe Biden’s shameful attempt to convince the world it was true.
Last night, we saw some of the most harrowing videos I have ever seen of kids’ bodies in the burning tents of Rafah (TENTS! How can the Israelis even begin to justify airstrikes on people living in tents?) with heads literally severed from their necks, and there is almost total silence and disinterest from the Western political class.
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